Second Cake in Portugal! & Benagil

Posted On January 2, 2016

Coming after a break, indeed a long one ;)… This post is about my daughter’s 9th Birthday and mind blowing caves in Portugal!.

Its cake time!. There is no other better occasions than my daughter’s birthday make one. It was planned to be a garden theme cake. Well ahead of our trip to portugal, the fondant figurines like flowers,bees,snails were made ready. Â The cake was a Lemon yoghurt cake with White & dark chocolate Ganache and covered with Fondant.
The Bottom Layer was a 7″ cake tin and top two layers were smaller than that. I used my kitchen steel utensils for that. The top layer can serve only one portion. Birthday girl enjoyed the top yellow layer cake which was prepared with white chocolate icing on her request. I was particular about the small size cake. As we don’t wanted to eat the cake for Breakfast,Lunch & Dinner, rather also try some Portuguese dish out there.

Everytime I bake cake and decorate, I feel that there is still a lot to explore and learn.

Later on that day we visited Zoo Marine, water theme park. What we still remember is Dolphin and Dolphin emotions program which is a experience on its own. Will cover more in later post.

Lemon Yoghurt cake

Ingredients :

Joghurt – 200ml
Self Rising Cake flour -3 and 1/2 cup
Butter -150 gm
Egg -5
Lemon Zest – from Â 2lemons
Sugar – 1 and 1/2 cup

Method:

1. Add Butter to the bowl and cream it until smooth. Now add sugar and mix it with hand mixer.

2. Add Egg one by one and mix it well and then add lemon Zest.

3. Add the Flour and Joghurt alternating each until you get a smooth paste.

4. Preheat the oven and bake it approximately for 20 – 30 min. Check with skewer if it is done before removing from the oven. ( I had a gas oven during the vacation, which was quite different than electric one)

Benagil Caves in Algarve, Southern region of Portugal

Benagil is famous for sea caves and it has one of the largest sea caves in Europe. There is a boat trip, starting from Benagil, which tours around all the sea water caves nearby.

Our Captain of the boat is a friendly Portugese man, who has amazing skills. It was an experience of its own, when he tried to steer the boat into a narrow cave and he could do so only at the right point in time when the wave gets below an height. Otherwise, it could have hit one of our head top. He also showed us lots of interesting rock formations like an human face, Crocodile and an elephant. The Paradise beach is the best cave that we liked, which true to its name was an excellent romantic spot completely covered by a dome and small opening, which lights exactly the beach below inside the cave. Apart from caves there are also cute little beach in Benagil.

Fishing boat picture taken from Benagil beach.

The captain also offered us an exclusive trip to private beach only accessible by boat. But unfortunately, we could not fit it in our schedule this time and we promised to take his offer next time. So, if you are around Benagil and want to spend some romantic time with your loved one, this would be a perfect place. Below are two pictures from Paradise beach.